Dorian Yates won six Mr Olympia titles. He was the best bodybuilder on the planet. His profession. His entire life. He trained four hours a week. Four. Let that sit for a second.
I've spent years in the gym. I've tried every programme, every split, every protocol the internet has to offer. Earlier this year I ran an experiment - hitting every muscle group twice per week on a 9-10 day cycle. Sometimes training 4, 5, 6 days a week. More volume. More frequency. More everything.
Want to know what I had to show for it? Nothing. No visible difference. Worse sleep. Worse recovery. Less energy for everything outside the gym. Joints creaking like an old gate.
Then I stripped it all back. And everything improved.
Vilfredo Pareto discovered that 80% of results come from 20% of causes. He first clocked it with pea pods in his garden - 20% of the pods produced 80% of the peas. Then he found the same pattern across Italian land ownership. Turns out this distribution governs almost everything. Including your physique. Most men are spending 80% of their effort on things that contribute almost nothing. And the 20% that actually matters? They're either ignoring it or getting it wrong.
I. The trap
There's nothing wrong with wanting to optimise your training. I get it. I'm wired the same way. But there's a difference between optimising and overcomplicating, and most men crossed that line months ago without realising.
Dorian put it perfectly. "We can make this whole process sound very complicated, which is what internet gurus and trainers try to do to validate themselves. It's not that complex." That was from a man who dominated bodybuilding for the best part of a decade training less than most recreational gym-goers.
And Dorian wasn't the first to figure this out. Mike Mentzer, 1978 Mr Universe, was preaching this decades earlier. Mentzer trained clients sometimes as little as once or twice a week. A handful of exercises. One working set to absolute failure per movement. People looked at his programmes on paper and thought it was a joke. It looked like nothing. And his clients grew faster than people training five or six days a week. His line on it was classic. "It is human nature to assume that more is better. It's not. Except for money and women, and you're probably wrong about those two as well."
Mentzer learned it from Arthur Jones, the inventor of Nautilus machines. Jones then influenced Dorian. Three generations of the greatest minds in bodybuilding all arrived at the same conclusion. Less volume. More intensity. More recovery. Better results. And yet here we are in 2026, still arguing about whether five days a week is enough.
Your body has a finite ability to recover from training at any one given point. Exceed it and you don't just stop growing - you go backwards. Injuries. Sickness. Regression. Think of it like an office building in a storm. Windows smashing, blinds flying out. If the damage exceeds the rate the workers can repair it, the building just degrades. You can do that to your muscles. You can do that to your entire body.
It's not just training volume that fills your recovery bucket. It's everything. Work stress. Relationship stress. Financial pressure. Poor sleep. Travel. Screens. It all fills the same bucket. Your body doesn't care whether the stress came from a barbell or a boardroom.
I've been under it lately. Running the business, coaching clients, creating content, managing everything that comes with building something from scratch. I'd been running full body training for a while and getting solid results from it. The experiment was just curiosity. I wanted to see if more frequency would take things further. It didn't. And when I look back honestly, it wasn't just the training volume that stalled me. It was the training volume on top of everything else. My total systemic load was through the roof and I was too stubborn to see it.
Men spending hours researching the optimal programme on Reddit when they haven't progressively overloaded a single lift in 6 months. Lads with 15 supplements on their kitchen counter who can't hit a proper squat below parallel. Meal timing debates from people who aren't even hitting their protein target. Being busy in the gym is not the same as being productive in the gym. One builds a physique. The other builds an Instagram story.
II. I trained more and got less
I'll be transparent about this because I think it matters more than any study I could quote.
Earlier this year I decided to push it. Every muscle group hit twice per week. 9-10 day training cycles. Sometimes 4 sessions a week, sometimes 5, sometimes 6. I tracked everything. The logic was simple - more stimulus, more growth. That's what the internet told me.
No visible difference in the mirror. Sleep quality tanked. Recovery was non-existent. Energy for life outside the gym dropped off a cliff. Pumps were flat. Joints were unhappy. And I was spending more time in the gym than at any point in the last 5 years with absolutely nothing to show for it.
Then I stripped it back to full body training. Fewer sessions. Compound focused. Progressive overload on the lifts that actually matter.
Within weeks, and I mean weeks, recovery improved. Sleep improved. Energy came back. Pumps were better. Progression on lifts came easier. Physique actually looked better. Joints stopped complaining. And suddenly I had time and energy for zone 2 cardio, sauna, walking, red light therapy - all the things that arguably contributed more to how I looked and felt than those extra gym sessions ever did.
I trained more and got less. Then I trained less and got more.
Dorian did the same thing across his entire career with his training diaries. He collected data obsessively. His conclusion after years of this? "If I trained more often, my progress would come to a halt. Go back to an abbreviated routine - boom, start growing again. Don't need to learn that lesson over and over again."
Mentzer arrived at the same place through pure logic. He applied rational thinking to training the way an engineer would. Strip out everything that isn't directly producing the result. What's left is the minimum effective dose. One working set, taken to true failure, with enough recovery time to actually grow from it. He won Mr Universe with that approach. Dorian won six Olympias with a slightly expanded version of the same philosophy. Arthur Jones built an entire equipment empire around it.
Three of the most influential figures in the history of bodybuilding. All saying the same thing. Do less. Do it harder. Recover properly. Grow.
All gains happen between your Minimum Effective Volume and your Maximum Recoverable Volume. I'd blown past the maximum. My body wasn't adapting, it was just surviving. And the life stress I was carrying meant I had even less recovery capacity than I thought.
III. The only thing that actually grows muscle
The research on this isn't complicated. We just made it complicated because simple doesn't sell supplements.
Progressive overload is the primary driver of hypertrophy. Full stop. Muscles grow in response to increasing mechanical tension over time. Not from confusing them with a new programme every month. Not from supersets and drop sets and whatever else some influencer filmed for content that week. Dorian. "You must get stronger to get bigger. If your weights are going up, great sign. You're growing. If they've stayed the same as they were last month, you're not going anywhere."
The effective range for hypertrophy and strength is 30-80% of your one rep max. You don't need to max out every session. You need to consistently apply progressive load. And only about 10% of your total sets should actually go to failure. The rest should stop 1-2 reps short. This was a massive shift for me. I was grinding every set to failure thinking that was the path. It wasn't. It was just generating fatigue without additional stimulus.
For volume, the research supports 5-15 sets per muscle group per week for most people. 5 just to maintain. 10-15 to grow. That's it. More than that and you're likely past your MRV, especially if you've got life stress stacking on top.
3-4 days per week is enough for an aesthetic physique. Full body, compound focused. Four to five exercises per session. Progressive overload on every lift. Dorian trained three to four times a week, three to four exercises per body part, one to two warm-up sets then one all-out working set. Mentzer sometimes prescribed even less. Two or three sessions a week. A few compound movements. One set to failure each. Done. Both approaches operating at the absolute top of the field.
Protein. Roughly 1g per lb bodyweight from whole food sources. Meat, fish, eggs, dairy. Aim for 700-3,000mg of leucine per meal from real food. Hit your protein target daily and most of your nutrition problems disappear. Everything else, meal timing, carb cycling, intermittent fasting, is noise until this number is locked in.
Sleep. This is when you actually grow. Growth hormone release, testosterone production, muscle protein synthesis, all sleep dependent. Dorian takes low-dose GH before bed specifically because it matches the body's natural rhythm. Even at 60+, he optimises for sleep above almost everything else. If the greatest bodybuilder alive puts sleep first, maybe you should too.
Actually measure your recovery. There are two zero-cost tests you can do every morning. First, grip strength. Squeeze a scale or grip tool when you wake up. If you're 10-20% below your baseline, your nervous system hasn't recovered. That's your sign to back off that session. Drop the intensity or take the day. Second, the CO2 tolerance test. Four deep breaths through the nose, then one final deep inhale. Exhale as slowly as possible through your mouth. Under 25 seconds means you're not recovered. 30-60 is the green zone. Over 65 and you're fully ready. Takes 60 seconds and it turns "listen to your body" from vague nonsense into an actual protocol.
IV. Your job is killing your gains
This is the section that would've saved me months.
Your body has one recovery bucket. Training fills it. But so does everything else. Work deadlines. Arguments. Poor sleep. Travel. Financial stress. Screen time at midnight. It all goes into the same bucket. And if that bucket is already 80% full from life before you even touch a barbell, you've got very little room for training stimulus before you overflow into regression.
Your significant other yells at you, that stress fills your cup of systemic fatigue. You go on your normal run after that and you get sick because you've exceeded your capacity. If you've got a massive work sprint coming, lower your training to maintenance volume. You'll lose nothing. And when the stress passes, you ramp back up like nothing happened. Compare that to the alternative. Training through it, getting sick halfway through the week, missing everything, and spending a week and a half rediscovering what your body can do.
The men I coach, bankers, agency owners, founders, they all hit this wall at some point. Training harder is not the answer when your life stress is already maxed. Work until your recovery point. Not past it. That applies to the gym and your life.
When I dropped from 5-6 sessions to fewer, higher-quality sessions, I freed up capacity for the things that actually move the needle long-term. Zone 2 cardio. Sauna three times a week. 10,000 steps daily. Morning sunlight. And red light therapy. I've been using full body red light exposure in the mornings and red light over the reproductive organs through the winter here in the UK. I use @RedLightRising for this. The research on red light and testosterone is genuinely interesting.
There's a 1939 study showing UV and infrared light exposure led to a 120% increase in testosterone. More recent research shows red light specifically may support ATP production in the cells it contacts, and there's promising data on fertility and testicular function. During a British winter when sunlight is practically non-existent, I've found it makes a noticeable difference to energy, recovery, and overall wellbeing. It's become a non negotiable part of my morning protocol. Life on easy mode.
For clients dealing with chronic stress on top of demanding jobs, I also use taurine and shilajit in the recovery protocol. One of my clients messaged me yesterday saying he's already feeling different. Better sleep, calmer energy throughout the day. It's early days but the pattern is consistent across everyone I've put on this protocol.
Taurine is arguably one of the most underrated supplements going. It declines by 80% as we age, it supports mitochondrial function, reduces systemic inflammation by up to 73% in some markers, improves insulin sensitivity, and there's a recent study in Science showing a 10-12% lifespan increase in mice with supplementation. I have clients taking 1-2g two to three times daily with meals. Shilajit at 500mg on high-demand days acts as an adaptogenic amplifier. Research shows it maintains strength under fatigue and supports connective tissue recovery. But both of these are amplifiers. They sit on top of the fundamentals. If you're not sleeping, not training smart, and not managing your stress, no supplement is going to save you.
And yes I'm saying this as a man currently deep in an almond croissant addiction. Nobody's perfect. But the fundamentals still come first.
V. The 20% (in order)
This is the 20%. Ranked in order. Most men have this completely inverted.
Progressive overload on compound movements. Squat, bench, deadlift, overhead press, rows, pull-ups. Track your numbers. Add weight or reps weekly. Dorian's entire back session was pull-downs, rows, deadlifts. Three or four exercises, warm up, one all-out working set each. Half an hour. Done. If I write this down on a piece of paper it looks like nothing. That's because it IS the 20%. The 20% always looks too simple.
1g protein per lb bodyweight from whole food sources. Meat, fish, eggs, dairy. Hit this daily and most of your nutrition problems vanish. Stop debating meal timing if you're not even hitting this number consistently.
7-8 hours quality sleep. Non-negotiable. This is when you grow. Every hour you lose costs you more than any supplement could ever give back.
Manage your total systemic load. Morning sunlight. Breath work. Zone 2 cardio. Sauna. Red light. Digital boundaries. Walking. Measure your recovery, grip strength and CO2 tolerance every morning. Train to your recovery point, not past it.
10,000+ steps daily. The most underrated body composition tool in existence. Low-stress calorie expenditure that doesn't tax your recovery bucket. Embarrassingly simple. Embarrassingly effective.
Consistency over intensity. Three full body sessions per week for 52 weeks will always beat six sessions per week for eight weeks before burnout
I had a client come to me training 6 days a week. Ninety-minute sessions. Tracking every macro to the gram. Same physique he'd had for 18 months. We stripped it back to 4 sessions, 45 minutes each, focused on compounds with progressive overload. Fixed his sleep. Added morning walks. Introduced the CO2 tolerance test so he could actually listen to his body instead of just battering it. Within 90 days he'd dropped significant body fat and added real weight to his deadlift. Less time in the gym. Better results. That's the 80/20.
Do these six things for 90 days. Then come back and tell me your genetics are the problem.
VI. What's actually BS
More volume does not mean more growth. Dorian. "More intensity is better, not more volume." Mentzer. "More is not better. Better is better." I proved this to myself this year. There's a Maximum Recoverable Volume and most men passed it months ago. They just mistake soreness for progress.
Changing your programme every four weeks. Your muscles don't get confused. That's not a thing. They respond to progressive overload applied consistently over time. Switching programmes monthly means you never progress on anything. Run the same structure for 4-6 weeks, deload, adjust. Don't overhaul everything because you got bored.
Supplement stacks before basics are dialled in. If you're spending £200 a month on supplements and sleeping 5 hours a night, you're not optimising. You're coping. Fix sleep. Fix protein. Fix training. Add taurine for mitochondrial and anti-inflammatory support. Shilajit as a recovery amplifier on hard days. But the fundamentals come first. Always.
Training to failure every single set. Dorian trained to failure, on one working set per exercise after warm-ups. Not five sets to failure. Mentzer was even more extreme. One set. True failure. Move on. The research confirms about 10% of your total sets should hit true failure. Everything else should stop 1-2 reps short. You're generating fatigue faster than stimulus. Save failure for the money set.
The supplement industry thrives on the 80% of men who refuse to do the 20% that's free.
VII. It. was never a knowledge problem
Pareto himself warned against this exact trap. "Men follow their sentiments and their self-interest, but it pleases them to imagine that they follow reason." Men tell themselves they need more information, more complexity, more volume, because it feels productive without the risk of actual failure.
You see it in jiu-jitsu. The guy who rolls at 100% every session is always the one with the broken elbow and the least mat time. The right question isn't how hard are you training. It's whether you're training to get better or training to cleanse your demons. You can have both. But don't let the demon cleansing overrun your periodisation.
Most men don't have a knowledge problem. They have an execution problem. And increasingly, they have a recovery problem they won't admit to because rest feels like weakness.
It's not. It's the 20%.
And sometimes... forget the studies entirely. Follow your intuition. If your body is telling you to train, train. If it's telling you to rest, rest. You lived in your body for decades before you ever read a research paper. That signal matters more than any meta-analysis. Science gives you the framework. Your body gives you the real-time data. Learn to trust both.
You don't need another programme. You need to actually finish one.
It's not complicated. It never was.
Progressive overload on compound lifts. Protein. Sleep. Manage your total stress load, in the gym and in life. Walk. Red light. Taurine. Show up consistently. Measure your recovery. Train to your recovery point, not past it.
That's the 20% that builds 80% of the physique you want.
Dorian Yates won six Olympias training four hours a week. Mentzer won Mr Universe training even less. I spent months pushing 5-6 sessions a week and had nothing to show for it. Then I stripped it back, freed up recovery capacity, and everything improved.
The men I work with who transform fastest aren't the ones who know the most. They're the ones who do the basics with intent, day after day, long after the motivation fades.
Stop optimising the 80% that doesn't matter. Start executing the 20% that does.
90 days. That's all I'm asking.
— Achilles
Sons of Achilles is free. Link in bio.
